"Waiting there were
poems for me, poems I'd learned in class: Olga Cabral had a poem I
haven't found since, "Lillian's Chair," and a poem called
"Dog
Hospital," by Peter Wild. I tried, as a sort of prickly numbness
took over my lower half, to recite the poems in my head. I moved my
lips. "

Alice Sebold,
Lucky, Chapter One, ISBN: 0316096199

LUCKY, BY ALICE
SEBOLD , SCRIBNER'S, 254 PAGES By
Sally Eckhoff

Sept.
27, 1999 |Whether
or not you'd go out of your way to read anything that might be classified as
a rape memoir, give Alice Sebold your attention for her first five pages and
you're in for the whole ride. Written in a fever of unapologetic
self-discipline, "Lucky" is just about everything you'd expect it not to be.
There's no expedition in search of psychic wounds, no yanking at your sleeve
to get your conscience into the picture. Sebold was only a college freshman
in a beat-up sweater when her horrible assault occurred, and she was a
virgin. Maybe if rape was classified as a form of torture it would be
simpler to map out the parameters of the damage it causes. Right now, as
Patricia Weaver Francisco, author of "Telling," has said, a lot of people
think of it as a form of bad sex.

At first, "Lucky" seems to
bounce you into a state of half-belief. The rape itself, narrated at the
very beginning of the book, is so merciless it's nearly impossible to absorb.
The man beat her and tore at her; the shriveled object in the courtroom
evidence bag was so stiff and black -- like ruined leather -- that it was
hard to tell it was her blood-soaked underwear.

Once Sebold goes back to her
bookish family to repair herself, her household becomes an odd but dramatically
rich place to begin to heal. The first thing her father asks her when she gets
back home is whether she'd like something to eat. "That would be nice," she says,
"considering the only thing I've had in my mouth in the last twenty-four hours
is a cracker and a cock."

The smart but not good-looking
Alice (as she sees herself, wrongly on that last count) keeps a cool head as her
family wavers, as she leaves them once more to return to school, as she helps
catch her assailant. And then, in a wrenching moment that comes from out of
nowhere, she has to keep from losing her mind when she faces the police lineup
and fingers the wrong guy. How in the world is this ever going to work out?

Sebold credits teachers,
including Tess Gallagher and Geoffrey Wolff, who surely had something to do with
the making of a writer who can spit out a harrowing story that's still vibrating
and flexible. Reading Sebold is like listening to Syd Straw singing about the
worst thing that ever happened to her. Not that being funny doesn't help; Sebold
can do that, too. But mainly, "Lucky" derives imaginative traction from its form
and style, its continually expanding view. By the end, the mysteries of
individuality that it conveys seem accessible only to the reluctantly brave. The
book's acknowledgments conclude with some lovely, ardent thanks to Sebold's
vulnerable mother. Because "Lucky" makes compassion a more personal, less
automatic response, this gift to her mother seems light enough to carry and to
keep.

salon.com
| Sept. 27, 1999

About the writer
Sally Eckhoff lives in upstate New York. She is a regular contributor to Salon

Above and beyond

There aren't many women
who come out and say they've been raped who also write a novel about violence -
let alone narrated by a 14-year-old from heaven - Alice Sebold admits: but that
doesn't make it therapy

When
she was 18, a student, a virgin, and on her way home one night, Alice Sebold
was brutally raped in a tunnel. Her attacker raped her with his fist and his
penis; he beat her up; he urinated on her face. When she got home that
night, her father asked her if she'd like something to eat. "That would be
nice," she said, "considering the only thing I've had in my mouth in the
last 24 hours is a cracker and a cock."

It
shocked him, she says. But it made him realise that, despite what had
happened to her, "I was still the sarcastic kid who talked bodies, and that
was not going to change."

Alice
Sebold has a way of subverting expectations. She has written a novel, The Lovely
Bones, which has been described as "an uplifting book about the abduction and
murder of a young girl". Many Americans have said that it provides them with "Christian
comfort" - but she doesn't believe in God. Her book is narrated from heaven -
though she's not sure the afterlife exists. The heroine of The Lovely Bones,
Susie, is raped, as she was; but Susie is dead, which she isn't. (More on being
not-dead later.) Everyone expects her to be younger than 39 - "which is old for
a first novelist, so they keep telling me". And although the book is a
stratospheric once-in-a-decade bestseller in the US - it has sold more than a
million copies in a month, with no Oprah-endorsement or big advance - and
although Lynne "Ratcatcher" Ramsay has bought the film rights and the bellboy in
the hotel recognised her, Sebold herself is cool but low-key, "putting one foot
in front of the other", not sure what she'll buy with her new money (maybe an
olive tree for the garden, maybe another dog if Lilly the German shepherd will
let her).

The Lovely
Bones opens with the kind of lines that make you famous. "My name was Salmon,
like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December
6, 1973." Susie was killed by a neighbour, Mr Harvey, walking through a
cornfield on her way home. "'Please,' I said. 'Don't,' I said. Sometimes I
combined them. 'Please don't' or 'Don't please.' It was like insisting that a
key works when it doesn't or yelling 'I've got it, I've got it, I've got it' as
a softball goes sailing over you into the stands."

Susie
narrates the novel from heaven, from where she watches the hunt for her body (only
an elbow is ever found), the search for her murderer, the agonising grief of her
family. She sees her mother "bracing under the weight of it, a weight that she
naively hoped might lighten someday, not knowing that it would only go on to
hurt in new and varied ways for the rest of her life." And her father: "Every
day he got up, before sleep wore off, he was who he used to be. Then as his
consciousness woke, it was as if poison had seeped in. At first he didn't even
get up. He lay there under a heavy weight, the guilt on him, the hand of God
pressing down on him saying, 'You were not there when your daughter needed you.'
"

As she
watches, she begins to understand her family in ways that would not have been
possible if she'd stayed living; and they become free only when Susie herself
has "given up on earth". It is a stunningly sad novel - and yet it is also, said
Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times, "a deeply affecting meditation on the
ways in which terrible pain and loss can be redeemed - slowly, grudgingly and in
fragments - through love and acceptance."

So far, the
Atlantic separates critical opinion like a boxing referee. Reviews of The Lovely
Bones in the US have matched its sellout status with blanket praise and
excitement, from Jonathan Franzen to Anna Quindlen to Michael Chabon; even the
usually tough Kakutani loved it, admiring "her ability to capture both the
ordinary and the extraordinary, the banal and the horrific, in lyrical,
unsentimental prose; her instinctive understanding of the mathematics of love
between parents and children; her gift for making palpable the dreams, regrets
and unstilled hopes of one girl and her family." In Britain, by contrast, Philip
Hensher in the Observer wrote, "Ultimately it seems like a slick, overpoweringly
saccharine and unfeeling exercise in sentiment and whimsy." In the US, The
Lovely Bones has been criticised for showing a godless heaven; in Britain,
critic Paul Morley worried that the book was propaganda "from some peculiar
church in the middle of America". In Britain, Private Eye and Ali Smith in this
newspaper put the book's success down to September 11 and the consolation that,
even if nearly 3,000 people were vaporised at their desks, they're alive and
well upstairs somewhere; in the US, says Ron Charles, book editor of the
Christian Science Monitor, its popularity is in spite of September 11, child
abductions being "perhaps the only dread darker than our new fear of terrorism".
In the US, it has been praised for its lack of sentimentality; in Britain,
Natasha Walter called it "an incredibly candyfloss read, very, very sugary".

Whether
this is down to cultural differences or the disappointment of raised
expectations will emerge only when British readers get hold of the book. "If I
were a writer with a first novel out now, I would hate me; I'm using up a lot of
newspaper pages," says Sebold, when we meet in a hotel in some
town-without-pedestrians in Texas, the latest place on her book tour. She is
tired from the grind of readings, interviews, hotel rooms. She has clear,
white-marble skin, messy black shiny hair and sexy lips, and is soberly dressed
in black with a maroon silk shirt; she wears a model of Frankenstein made out of
a match around her neck (her "lucky charm") and what she calls her "Asian-looking"
eyes are hidden by a pair of extraordinary 1940s glasses with heavy black
diamond-shaped frames, studded with diamanté. (She always takes these off for
photographs, and considers the glasses a form of disguise from her "temporal
literary celebrity".) "I think that Britain is going to feel that this book did
really well in America, so a) there must be something wrong with it and b)
dammit, it's not going to do well here. It was idiosyncratic at the time of
publication, but it appears to have been accepted by the 'establishment' now. So
what can I say? I did not expect popular success in the United States or
anywhere else, I do not expect to be popular in Great Britain - and they may
actually fulfil that expectation." She laughs, and it's very deep, like thunder.

The view of
heaven presented in The Lovely Bones is a familiar one - a place of happiness,
without judgment, where you get what you desire as long as you know why you
desire it. Susie's heaven has a school but no teachers, fashion magazines for
textbooks, peppermint-stick ice cream on tap. Although, says Susie, "I could not
have what I wanted most: Mr Harvey dead and me living." There are many others
who have portrayed heaven in similar terms, as we learn from Peter Stanford's
excellent Heaven: A Traveller's Guide To The Undiscovered Country - from Virgil's
paradise, which was an idealisation of his Italian countryside just as Susie's
is an idealisation of her own environment, to Monty Python's Meaning Of Life,
where a choir is for ever singing Every Single Day Is Christmas Day.

"It's a
very simplistic understanding of what heaven would contain," Sebold says. "To
me, the idea of heaven would give you certain pleasures, certain joys - but it's
very important to have an intellectual understanding of why you want those
things. It's also about discovery, and being able to come to the conclusions
that elude you in life. So it's from the most simplistic things - Susie wants a
duplex - to larger things, like being able to understand why her mother was
always slightly distant from her."

Our
persistent obsession with the afterlife, what Stanford calls "a glorious but
untried promise, utterly open to the wiles of our imagination", is certainly a
reason for the success of The Lovely Bones in the US. He writes, "There have
always been... unconventional individuals able to service those who are too
restless to wait and see [what heaven is like]. The Victorians went to
spiritualists and mediums; we, in turn, devour the literature of near-death
experiences to satisfy our hankering to know if there is anything more to come."
Americans are perhaps particularly keen on this sort of thing: a 1987 poll by
American Health magazine found that 42% believed they had had contact with
someone who had died, and a book called Hello From Heaven!, subtitled A New
Field Of Research - After-Death Communication - Confirms That Life And Love Are
Eternal, was a bestseller. (Stanford also says, incidentally, that some
Christian fundamentalists, of which there are tens of millions in the US,
believe the book of Revelation actually provides a street plan for heaven.)

Notably,
there is no God, Jesus or Bible in Susie's afterlife, even though some readers,
in Mark Lawson's words, have taken the novel as "factual confirmation of the
existence of Christianity". Sebold jokes that she "doesn't know enough about
Christianity to know whether or not this is true". She is not religious. "I
think some people get angry about this because they want a more justified,
religious-based reason for some of the decisions I made about heaven - and I
just don't have them. It is certainly not a religious book, but if people want
to take things and interpret them, then I can't do anything about that. It is a
book that has faith and hope and giant universal themes in it, but it's not
meant to be, 'This is the way you should look at the afterlife'."

Her
upbringing in suburban Philadelphia (her mother was a local newspaper journalist,
her father a professor in Spanish) was, she says, "wishy-washy Episcopalian" (Anglican):
"I went to church irregularly and was mostly reading comics in the pew. My mom
was briefly the warden for the vestry - but she quit after I was raped because
the way people responded made her so sick. There's a religious idea that being
raped is a shame-filled thing and maybe you brought it on yourself. So the
accusation that I'm religious is kind of hilarious to me."

Is she,
then, "spiritual", the modern-day substitute for religious? (This seems to cover
everything from believing in kindness to thinking you're "giving something back"
by having an aromatherapy bath.) "In my 20s, I railed against anything 'spiritual',
I thought it was all crap," she says. "Then when I was 33, a miserable failure -
I don't know whether it was spirituality or getting older, but I decided I
needed to lighten up a little on my judgment of myself and the world. So there's
that. I like gardening - it's a place where I find myself when I need to lose
myself. Killing slugs. Very spiritual! And I believe in dogs." Her advice to
writers is to get a dog, so that you can "have a relationship that's nothing to
do with words".

One wonders
if another reason for the book's vast popularity is that it provides some
consolation for the living - that the dead are "only in the next room", say, but
also that the living can go on living. "It's about imagining it's not over when
it's over," says Sebold. (Just as, perhaps, the rape victim's life is not over,
either.) "That there is an existence for the living and the dead after someone's
died."

This echoes
many people's experiences of bereavement - that the dead stay with us and you
do, somehow, survive grief. And, as Kate Berridge wrote in Vigor Mortis: "As for
the people we love who die, we should not shun them. We should dare to
fraternise with these 'people of the pearl', as Emily Dickinson called them."
The "lovely bones" in the title refers to the relationships that form in the
novel after Susie's death, and because of it, and somehow involving it: "These
are the lovely bones that had grown around my absence," says Susie, "the
connections - sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often
magnificent - that happened after I was gone." The new life that configures
around the loss.

Sebold says
that many of the people who come to her readings have had someone close to them
killed. "They are fascinated by the idea that when the dead are done with the
living, the living can go on to other things," she says. "You usually hear the
reverse idea, that the bereaved have to let go of the dead. I think it speaks to
their experience, that some release has come to them at some point and they're
never exactly sure why. The idea that it is, perhaps, a reciprocal relationship
between the living and the dead. Also in America there's so much instruction on
how to do things - how to grieve, rights and wrongs - which is very scary to me.
So I think the idea that grief is organic and fluid is attractive if you've lost
somebody. Grief doesn't need to be a scary thing." At a reading, a man said to
Sebold that the book was "a permission slip to grieve whatever way I wanted to".
Sebold says that many of her friends died of Aids in New York in the 1980s. "I
guess that's part of that subconscious bubbling stew that informs the book."

I wonder if
new relationships, lovely bones, formed after Sebold's rape, as they did after
Susie's murder. "Actually, I think I lost more people than I gained," she says.
"Although it happened for me at an age - 18 - where you lose people anyway." (It
could also tell us something about how people see rape.) "It definitely bonded
my relationship with Tess Gallagher [the poet, Sebold's teacher and wife of
Raymond Carver, whom Sebold remembers being awkward at parties and carrying
brownies in his pockets]. Tess encouraged me to write about the rape [she
suggested Sebold write a poem starting with the line 'If they caught you'] and
she came to my preliminary hearing in court. But I lost a lot of friendships -
if anyone said something stupid about violence or rape, I used to say, just fuck
you."

Three years
ago, Sebold published a memoir about her rape, which she called Lucky because
"in the tunnel where I was raped... a girl had been murdered and dismembered. I
was told this story by police. In comparison, they said I was lucky." Several
months after the attack, Sebold saw her rapist in the street. He greeted her
casually, with a smile, saying, "Hey, girl, don't I know you from somewhere?"
She went to court, endured a typically savage cross-examination (the police told
her she was the best rape witness they'd ever seen) and secured a rare
conviction. Her rapist received the maximum jail sentence.

Many have
thought that The Lovely Bones, which opens with a girl's rape and murder, must
be an imagining of the other girl's story; the "unlucky" girl who didn't get
away. "It was never a conscious thing to tell her story," Sebold says. "I didn't
know the details of her case, and the police said she was a girl but in the
United States that could mean she's 85. But obviously I'd be an idiot to deny
that inside my unconscious there's something like that going on."

It is
understandable that Sebold fights analysis of the parallels between getting over
rape in her own life and getting over grief in The Lovely Bones - artists often
resist the idea that their work is informed by their experience, fearing it
belittles the imagination. The suggestion some have made that The Lovely Bones
is "working out" her rape infuriates her. "First of all, therapy is for therapy.
Leave it there. Second, because you're a rape victim, everyone wants to turn
everything you do into something 'therapeutic' - oh, I understand, going to the
bathroom must be so therapeutic for you! After I'd started The Lovely Bones, I
decided to break off and write Lucky, to make sure that Susie wasn't saying
everything that I wanted to say about violent crime and rape. OK, there aren't
that many women who come out and say they've been raped who also write a novel
about violence. But when people discover you're a rape victim, they decide that's
all you are."

And so one
American magazine asked Sebold to pose for a photograph as if she were dead,
arms crossed over her chest, in a cornfield; another asked her to lie down
surrounded by dirty dismembered doll parts. (She declined both.) And on a recent
edition of Newsnight Review, the crime novelist Ian Rankin, discussing The
Lovely Bones, said, "When I read the novel, I didn't know... that she [Sebold]
had been raped... Once I was reading more of her into it, not just taking it as
straight fiction, then I suppose I thought of it in a lesser way." The comment,
says Sebold (ever the sarcastic kid who talked bodies), "ripped me a new asshole".
"You know, some of the writers who write about India are Indian," she says. "There
are a thousand writers with experiences in their background. The one thing I'm
certain my rape gave me in terms of writing The Lovely Bones is a feeling that I
could write a scene of violence with authority. It is extraordinary that knowing
I've been raped should lessen my achievement in anything."

Throughout
her rape, Sebold found she focused most on staying alive; she kissed the rapist
back when he commanded her to, she made him promise not to tell anyone (a ruse
to ensure her escape, to suggest she wouldn't go to the police). "He held my
life in his hand," she wrote. "Those who say they would rather fight to the
death than be raped are fools. I'd rather be raped a thousand times. You do what
you have to." She was surprised by this survival instinct, she says. "I grew up
hearing that it was better to die than be raped, but that's just not true. A
radio show guy in New York said to me [she puts on a gravelly, true-crime
voice]: 'So you wrote this book The Lovely Bones. A girl. Raped. Dead. You wrote
this book Lucky, about yourself. A girl. Raped. And in many ways dead.' I said,
I'm sorry, there's a big difference between me and a dead woman. I'm here
talking to you, for a start."

She also
thinks that the anonymity afforded to rape victims helps reinforce the idea that
they are "ruined". "I'm a big believer that the names of women who've been raped
should be published. Why should they be cloaked in shame? It's a story of
survival, which is actually heroic. The stereotype is that you're always weak or
passive or falling apart - so you don't talk about it because if you do, people
will change their opinion of what you're capable of. When the truth is that you're
probably capable of a lot more if you survived rape."

She
believes you control things by naming them, which is why she always talks about
her "rape" rather than, as one radio host did, "that horrible thing that
happened to you from which you have luckily recovered". And she thinks that
powerful women who've been raped should come out and tell their stories, both
for themselves (this echoes Susie in The Lovely Bones saying, "Each time I told
my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop, of pain") and for other women. "It
would get rid of the idea that if you're raped, your life is basically over.
Rape is a brutal experience, and it does change your life. But it sure doesn't
kill you, and I'm sure not dead."

After her
rape, Sebold went back to college and finished her degree. She had sex with a
boyfriend, Jamie, fairly soon after her return. "I willed myself to want it,"
she says. "I never really felt angry with men in general - I'd always had good
relationships with them and quite a few had listened to me after the rape,
sometimes more attentively than women, because they didn't have the fear that it
would happen to them. I sensed that if I started shunning men because of the
rape, I'd never stop." When she told Jamie she felt self-conscious, he said, "There's
no time for that. I've got to get up for Spanish in the morning. Let's get the
show on the road." "He fucked me hard," wrote Sebold. "I held on... I wept
louder than I ever could have imagined." It's standard bad sex, but rape echoes
through the experience. Sebold nods. "He's a stockbroker now."

Sebold
spent her 20s in New York, trying to be a writer while working as a research
analyst and teaching English (she considers this time her "apprenticeship"). "I
took the attitude: this rape is not going to fucking get to me. I lived in the
East Village, which was always anti-the rest of America. So while America was
going through the do-whatever-you-feel era, we were saying everything was
bullshit. Fuck feelings!" She says it took 10, maybe 15 years to get over the
rape. "A lot longer than if I hadn't intellectualised everything, denied that it
should have had an effect on me." Her 20s were "off-balance. I had jobs,
friendships and relationships, but... It's like when you walk into a house and
the floor slants. It can still hold chairs and tables and you can live in it,
but the floor is slanted." She was seeing men who drank a lot, like she did, and
she snorted heroin. "I used heroin recreationally for two years, and I did not
find it became habit-forming for me," she says. (She thinks she didn't become
addicted because of the warning of her mother's alcoholism, which is vividly
described in Lucky: "My mother's pillows when I was little smelled like cherries.
It was a sickeningly sweet smell. It was the same way my rapist smelled on the
night of my rape. I would not admit to myself until years later that this was
the smell of alcohol.") "The heroin was like booze and cigarettes and dating not
the most stable people - a distraction from me not feeling the feelings of the
rape. Vietnam vets call it 'self-medicating'."

A critical
point came when she bought a copy of Trauma And Recovery, the classic book about
sexual abuse and post-traumatic stress, because she was quoted in it (she'd
written a newspaper article about her rape). "I was failing miserably in New
York, I'd written two novels that weren't published. And I realised I was quoted
in the 'trauma' section of the book, but not in 'recovery'." She read the book,
realised she "wasn't all great" and went into therapy for three years.
Transformed, she took out a student loan, went to graduate school in California
to study creative writing, and on the first day met her husband, Glen David
Gold, author of the rapturously received Carter Beats The Devil, a magical
mystery tour of a novel which was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award.
"I was sitting at the back in the corner, aged 33, surrounded by all these young
tanned women in spaghetti straps, all cheerful and friendly and open. Glen came
in late and he couldn't get his motorcycle helmet off. So there it was!"

Was her
guard up, after all that had happened to her? "Oh yes, massively," she says. "When
we started feeling for each other, my reaction was: Oh fuck, here's another
thing that's going to derail me. I had decided writing was more important to me
than a relationship would be and this was my last chance - if I failed again,
this would be it. But we fell in love anyway." And Gold is not, she says, a
typical "guy". "He can't even get through a beer. He's a very sane, stable
person, extraordinarily responsible. He grew up watching men sponge off his mom,
and hating it. So he'd never do that. When he was eight, people used to call him
a 36-year-old midget." (In his acknowledgments in Carter Beats The Devil, Gold
writes of Sebold: "Mind-reader, levitator, secret weapon, gadfly, butterfly.
Artist's model, box jumper, diva, high-wire aerialist. Quick-change artiste,
sensation of the ages, and inquirer into the spirit world. Critic,
effects-builder, manager, diva, oracle, mistress of escapes, queen of the
mysteries, fellow conjurer, class act, and have I said 'diva' already? Friend,
sister, secret weapon, paramour. Wife! I love you - let's take over this evil
planet and make it a playground.")

It is
ordinary human connections - tricky, complicated - that make us human, Sebold
says, and which form the sustenance at the heart of The Lovely Bones. But she
believes we are losing our ability to build such relationships - even if New
Yorkers rediscovered it for a while after September 11 - which is why she set
the novel in the 1970s rather than today. "That was when suburban developments
were new - a time before media saturation, chain stores, malls, the internet,
homogenised places. What it's meant is that everyone's become more detached from
other human beings, sitting in their car or at their computer."

This
clearly resonates with a line in Kakutani's review of The Lovely Bones: "The
novel is an elegy... about a vanished place and time and the loss of childhood
innocence." Because the novel recalls a time when relationships and connections
were what made you who you are. "It's about living an extraordinary ordinary
life," Sebold says. "People who are living their lives very much attached to the
people around them, family, maybe, but also community and friends."

In some
ways, then, the messages that Susie teaches her family, and that readers take
from The Lovely Bones, are the same that Alice Sebold has learned from her life.
She was raped, and it was shattering, and as Susie says, "Horror on earth is
real and it is everyday." It never leaves you but, as Susie's father realises,
"You live in the face of it." She got older, relaxed, let her guard down, told
her story, found happiness in simple connections rather than defensiveness and
booze. Her memoir Lucky ends, "I live in the world where the two truths
co-exist, where both hell and hope live in the palm of my hand." She gets up at
3am to work because she likes writing in the dark, but she lives in the
California sunshine. When she signs people's books, Alice Sebold writes "Viva!"

The Lovely
Bones by Alice Sebold is published by Picador.

Lucky will
be published later this year, also by Picador.

Alice Sebold:
Rape and redemption

Her first
novel was a brutal tale of murder, and sold a record two-and-a-half million
copies in hardback. But the story of Alice Sebold's own teenage years makes for
far more shocking reading. Christina Patterson hears how she survived

06 June 2003

Alice Sebold
knows all about arresting first lines. "My name was Salmon, like the fish; first
name, Susie", begins her first novel, The Lovely Bones. "I was fourteen when I
was murdered on December 6, 1973." Her other book, Lucky, also goes straight for
the jugular: "In the tunnel where I was raped, a tunnel that was once an
underground entry to an amphitheatre, a place where actors burst forth from
underneath the seats of a crowd, a girl had been murdered and dismembered."
These are textbook fiction openings, their unadorned prose designed to maximise
the visceral punch. Another American creative writing graduate takes the
well-travelled, hard-boiled route to literary success.

But Lucky is
not a novel. When she was 18, the woman sitting in front of me, a woman with
translucent skin, pink lipstick and extraordinary quadrangular, diamanté-trimmed
glasses, was stopped on her way home from a college party. She was beaten, cut
and dragged into a tunnel, where she was sodomised and raped. Her assailant
thrust his penis into her mouth and urinated on her face, before raping her
again and grabbing the loose change from her pockets. " 'You're the worst bitch
I ever done this to,' " he told her. Alice Sebold was a virgin. She didn't know
how to follow the rapist's instructions: where to put her legs or how to "suck
dick". At the trial, months later, the white pants she had worn on the night,
now wrapped in plastic and passed around as evidence, were almost entirely red.

"I'm in the
dead zone," she announces with a bewitching pink smile, meaning nothing more
sinister than that she is extremely tired. She has come straight from the Hay
Festival and has just done four interviews, including Breakfast News and Woman's
Hour. Twenty-two years on, Alice Sebold spends a great deal of time sitting in
hotel rooms, being quizzed about the hour of brutality that turned her life
upside down. If she has had enough of discussing the terror, the pleading and,
most of all, the shame, she is polite enough not to show it.

It is not
Lucky, however, that has shot her into the literary stratosphere, the one that
secures the packed publicity schedule of a Hollywood star and suites in the
Savoy, such as the one we're sitting in now. Sebold's fame in America is not as
a celebrity rape victim. Lucky was published in the States in 1999. It got some
good reviews and then "sank into oblivion". She is famous because her first
novel, The Lovely Bones, was last year's publishing phenomenon. It sold
two-and-a-half million copies in hardback, a record for a first novel. The
paperback shot to the number one slot on Amazon six weeks before it came out. It
hasn't left the top 10 since.

As the opening
lines reveal, the novel is told in the voice of Susie Salmon, a 14-year-old girl
who has been raped and murdered. Speaking from heaven, a heaven with many of the
more comforting accoutrements of an American high school - room-mates,
counsellors and swings, but glossy magazines instead of textbooks and no
teachers - Susie tells the tale of her vicious abduction and murder in the
cornfield near her home and observes the sequence of events that follow. Her
elbow is found near a large patch of blood, but there is no other trace of a
body. This fosters an agonising false hope in her parents, which is gradually
replaced by the raw grief reserved only for relatives of the murdered or
disappeared. "Before sleep wore off, he was who he used to be," she says of her
father. "Then, as consciousness woke, it was as if poison seeped in."

Sebold's
portrayal of a family reeling under the weight of unimaginable loss is extremely
moving. Less convincing, perhaps, are the forays between heaven and earth. Susie
pops down to the family duplex at frequent intervals and is glimpsed,
fleetingly, in the corners of rooms. She even, at one point, enters the body of
a school-friend who is making love with her own childhood sweetheart. The
message, of course, is that "the line between the living and the dead could be
... murky and blurred".

Post September
11, this went down a storm: not just with the reading public, but with the
critics, too. Even The New York Times's fearsome Michiko Kakutani described it
as "a deeply affecting meditation on the ways in which terrible pain and loss
can be redeemed". In this country, the response was a little more muted. While
many continued to hail the book's pacing, elegance and luminous prose, others
had unlovely bones to pick. Joan Smith attacked the novel's "apple-pie
sentimentality", claiming that it made her queasy. Philip Hensher described the
book as "a slick, overpoweringly saccharine and unfeeling exercise in
sentiment". On this side of the Atlantic, was the implication, we are less
susceptible to such redemptive whimsy.

Lucky is a much
better book. It has all the pared-down strength and precision of the best
pickings of The Lovely Bones, without the lyrical flights or excesses. Beginning
with the graphic description of the rape in the tunnel, it is an account of a
life painfully transformed: from oddball student, draping her awkward curves in
flowing dresses and dreaming of being a poet, to rape victim and pariah. It is
one of the most shocking books I have ever read. It is also a book that Sebold
had no intention of writing.

"I never
thought about writing a memoir," she declares matter-of-factly, "because I
wanted to be a novelist or a poet." It was only after two years of writing The
Lovely Bones that she became aware that another story was fighting to come out:
"When I felt a sense of polemic entering the novel, I realised that I had to get
myself out of there ... It almost felt like Serena or Venus Williams; they lift
a lot of weights, they build a lot of muscle, in order that they can play the
game they're meant to play... It wasn't necessarily what I wanted to do, but if
I wanted to write the novel I had to do it."

The result is
profoundly moving, in so many more ways than the obvious. In addition to the
central trauma - the rape, the encounter with the rapist in the street six
months later, the trial and the long, slow and at times drug-addled years of
recovery - there is another, equally complicated, story. This is the story of a
lonely child in a middle-class household, where the father, a professor of
Spanish literature, retreats to his study and the mother, an alcoholic who
suffers from panic attacks, will only show her daughter affection if she is
tricked into it.

"I knew, now
that I had been raped, I should try to look good for my parents," the narrator
confides, after changing into the green-and-red kilt she knows her mother likes.
And yet, for much of the book, her parents seem strangely absent. It was only
when Sebold was researching it, looking at court files and speaking to her
family, that she discovered that neither of them had wanted to come to the
trial. "I remember my blood just running cold when I was on the phone with my
mother," she recalls. "I think that was probably the most painful thing for me
to realise."

Her mother is
effusively thanked in the acknowledgments; her father, more coolly, for "being
part of the show". How did they respond to an exposure that many would regard as
a humiliation? "My father did what he does," Sebold replies with a wry smile.
"He sent me a list of grammatical errors." For her mother "it was devastating",
but there was no anger. "The good thing with my mom is that she has tried to the
extent that she can ... to own up to her inabilities as a parent. There was a
typo that I left in which means that my mother was drinking for many fewer years
than she actually was," Sebold confides. "And because she was very supportive of
me I left that in as a kind of secret gift to her."

There were
plenty more shocks in store. Sebold discovered that the police inspector who
took her report wrote that he believed, "after interview of the victim, that
this case, as presented by the victim, is not completely factual". She learnt
that the rapist had made allegations that she had venereal disease, and that she
had asked for rough sex. She also saw the police photos of herself for the first
time. "It was intense," she says, with a degree of understatement, "to see the
palpable absence of myself in the photos straight afterwards and that I had
already taken on an intense level of shame."

One of the most
shocking moments in the book, one that made me gasp out loud, is the identity
parade that follows his arrest. Alice picks the wrong man. She later finds out
that the rapist has insisted on being accompanied by a friend who's almost a
double and who stares out at her from behind the mirror while the rapist himself
looks down. It is one of a range of tactics designed to weaken her. When, after
the traumas of the trial and the defence's excruciating cross-examination, Alice
is told by the bailiff: "you are the best rape witness I've ever seen on the
stand", you just want to break down and cry.

The woman
sitting opposite me, whose laugh is hearty and whose smile is broad and warm, is
a woman palpably at peace with herself. It has been a long road. After years
living in New York's East Village, failing to make it as a writer, snorting
heroin and trying to convince herself that she was OK, she finally acknowledged
that she wasn't. She had therapy, left New York and, on a creative writing
course in California, met her husband, the novelist Glen David Gold. For both of
them, finding each other coincided with spectacular literary success. It is, she
says, with peals of laughter and a twinkle in those deep, blue eyes, "awesome".

Away from the
whirlwind tours, the readings and the dinners, she longs for nothing more than
days at home in California, "walking the dog very early, working till around
noon or one o'clock and then going out for coffee someplace with Glen".

"You didn't ask
me about sex," says Sebold with relief, when I switch off the tape recorder and
start gathering up my things. I didn't need to. Alice Sebold has the rare glow
of one who has found true love, and whose demons are firmly in the past. The
author of Lucky deserves it.

'Lucky' is
published today by Picador, £7.99

02/06/03 -
Books section

In need of a
happy endingBy Rachel Cusk, Evening Standard

Alice
Sebold's first novel, The Lovely Bones, was a runaway best seller last year
in her native America. Its success, though expected, was never predicted to
reach quite the level it did: in the event its publishers had difficulty
manufacturing sufficient copies to meet the demand for them.

People
expressed surprise at such a phenomenon, customarily the province only of
novels chosen by Oprah Winfrey's book club. Their surprise was owed partly
to a perception of the book as "literary", meaning the opposite of populist
- a perception reinforced, if not created, by its enthusiastic reviews.

This view,
however, was markedly not shared by British critics when the book came out here
a few months ago. In the States a lone voice of dissent had memorably described
Sebold's moral vision as "aroma-therapeutic" and her standard of writing as
rudimentary; an opinion more or less shared by reviewers in this country, who
found the novel's mixture of schmaltz and violence bewildering.

Why, they
wanted to know, had the book done so extraordinarily well?

The Lovely
Bones was Sebold's first excursion into fiction, but in 1999 she had published a
memoir of the rape and assault she endured at the age of 19 as a student at
Syracuse University.

That memoir,
Lucky, is now being issued here, and it provides an answer of sorts to the
question of Alice Sebold's enormous popularity.

Translated
into fiction, the sensibility at work in these pages was always bound to strike
a loud and resounding chord. A deeply unpalatable piece of writing, Lucky comes
as close to expressing the personality of the American nation as the experiences
of a single, middle-class white woman could.

Except for
the subject, of course - submitting a poem about the rape for a writing
competition, Sebold recounts being told by one of the judges that "subjects like
rape had a place in poetry but that I would never win the prizes or cultivate an
audience at large that way". In The Lovely Bones she appears to have taken this
advice to heart and gone for child murder instead.

Lucky begins
with a detailed description of the rape, which took place in a park at night.

Certain that
she is to be killed, Sebold nevertheless struggles with her attacker, an
18-year-old black man who makes it clear to her that he has raped women before:
"You're the worst bitch I ever done this to," he said.

It was said
in disgust, it was said in analysis. He saw what he had bagged and didn't like
his catch. She does, however, survive, and, unlike most rape victims, she sees
her attacker eventually caught, tried and jailed, largely through her own
exertions.

This success
Sebold construes as a form of celebrity, something that interposes itself
between herself and the world but which nevertheless acts as an index of her
value. She is reinforced in this view by others, most particularly in the area
of writing, which for Sebold is a quasi-mystical, remedial activity.

She
continues her studies at Syracuse until, one night, her room-mate, Lila, is also
raped. This event causes Sebold to relapse. After leaving college she wanders in
a wilderness of drink and drugs for a decade before writing an article about her
rape in the New York Times. Oprah Winfrey reads it and invites Sebold on to her
show - and the rest, as it were, is history.

The journey
Sebold describes in Lucky lies, in one form or another, at the very bottom of
the American soul. It is the journey from conservatism via victimhood to a
condition of evangelism, of rebirth.

It is, even,
the pioneering journey - the assertion of and immersion in self, the absolute
lack of sentiment for the world as you find it, the pre-eminent value of
success.

Most
importantly, like The Lovely Bones, it describes how violence utterly destroys
compassion, and how, as a consequence, happy endings become a necessity.

In the
aftermath of 11 September, it doesn't surprise me that America went, as one, to
the bookshop.

by Nancy McCabe

LUCKY

by
Alice Sebold

Alice Sebold's 1999
memoir Lucky inevitably invites comparisons to her stunning 2002 first
novel, The Lovely Bones. Issued last October in paperback in the wake of
that novel's critical and commercial success, Lucky has remained on the
New York Times paperback nonfiction bestseller list for more than seventeen
weeks. Certainly one of the memoir's attractions is that it provides a glimpse
of the source material for The Lovely Bones, but finally it is much more
than that, a work that stands on its own as a testament to the way "You save
yourself or you remain unsaved."

As a memoir, Lucky lacks the brilliant novelistic artifice of The
Lovely Bones, a wrenching and riveting yet surprisingly funny, transcendent
account of the aftermath of a teenage girl's rape and murder--told from the
perspective of the girl, now in heaven. This voice is one of the enormous
gambles Sebold takes in her handling of subject matter and narrative devices.
Reading the novel becomes an oddly exhilarating experience because of its
portrayal of the resilience and hope that manage to spring from violence and
sorrow--and because of the seemingly effortless way Sebold pulls off one risky
move after another.

Sebold creates similar effects in Lucky but by a different route, her
candid voice and linear presentation a contrast to her novel's omniscient
sensibility and more fluid sense of time. Telling Lucky's story simply
and directly, Sebold achieves comparable harrowing and often funny and inspiring
effects as she recounts her brutal rape as a college freshman at Syracuse
University and the aftermath--and as in The Lovely Bones, from the first
page Sebold reveals her propensity for taking narrative risks.

The memoir begins with the violent attack, plunging readers immediately into the
excruciating particulars of the assault, told with such precise scenic details
that it is both deeply unsettling to read and impossible to put down. Beginning
with such a scene, omitting any preparation or background detail, has the
potential to come across as sensational or disorienting. But Sebold's skill at
involving the reader enables us, however uneasily, to experience on a visceral
level the devastation of this crime upon its victims.

"My life was over; my life had just begun," Sebold concludes her disturbing
opening. Aware that she changes in the eyes of anyone to whom she tells her
story, she nevertheless refuses to be silenced. Her headlong courage is evident
in the way she gently, but with understated pain, confronts her father's
bewildered questions about why she "allowed" the assault. Fueled by the same
stubborn courage and encouraged by poet and professor Tess Gallagher, she
submits for class comments a poem expressing her rage. Her classmates' puzzled
responses are agonizing but ultimately less significant than the permission
Gallagher and the act of writing has given her to feel anger and hate. Sebold's
trademark honesty is itself risky, but ultimately is what gives the story its
authenticity and power.

Anger and hate prove to be productive rather than destructive as they drive her
determination when she recognizes her rapist on the street and manages to secure
his arrest. She narrates the preliminary hearing, the shockingly botched police
lineup that puts her case on shakier ground, the jury selection process, and the
trial. But Sebold's hard-earned victory does not end her ordeal. Just as the
narrative reaches a plateau, Sebold's best friend is also assaulted. As her
friend struggles with her own trauma, Sebold faces another devastating truth
about the way rape can ravage solidarity, alienating victims from each other.

In the end, Sebold's triumph is an ambiguous one, her healing haunted by
setbacks as she flounders through drug dependency and sexual experimentation.
Though her path is a bumpy, disorderly, often painful one, the book's title
reinforces her profound gratitude at having survived. Lucky, like The
Lovely Bones, provides much insight into the devastation of sexual violence,
but these are far more than works about a social issue. With seemingly
effortless grace in both genres, Sebold offers profound truths about loss,
healing, and the bumbling and glorious ways we save ourselves through the
connections we forge--to work, to memory, and with each other.

Nancy McCabe's creative
nonfiction has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Massachusetts Review, Puerto
del Sol, Fourth Genre,
and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, among others, and has
twice been listed in Best American Essays.

Nancy McCabe's book After the Flashlight Man: A Memoir of Awakening. is
forthcoming.

Lucky, by Alice
Sebold

Review by Nick Gansner

Alice Sebold seemingly has many reasons to feel
lucky indeed. Her first novel, The Lovely Bones,
was published this summer to rave reviews and has become a fixture near the top
of the best seller lists. She writes occasionally for the New York Times Magazine.
The Village Voice named her one of its Writers on the Verge. She is married to
another successful writer, Glen David Gold, and they live in California with
their children. The title of her first published book, however, deals with
another, earlier, period in her life and is ironic and perhaps dubious, not
literal. When Alice Sebold was an eighteen-year-old freshman at Syracuse
University in 1981 she was beaten and raped by a stranger in a tunnel in a park
near campus on the last night of school year. A Syracuse police officer told her
that, compared to the girl who had been murdered and dismembered in the same
location, she was lucky.

Lucky, readers are, to have such a
skilled, determined, and courageous narrator. Sebold is frank and unpretentious,
and her memoir opens with an extremely graphic and brutal account of the rape
itself. She was grabbed from behind and told that if she screamed, she would be
killed. Yet, just as Sebold refused to allow her parents to hide from what had
happened to her, just as she surprised classmates by returning to school the
following semester, just as she pushed her case through the criminal justice
system all the way to a conviction for the rapist, she fought for herself. She
screamed. She bit her attacker, she kicked and punched back as she was kicked in
the side, as her hair was pulled from her scalp, as her head was pounded into
the pavement, as she was choked. As the rapist dragged her by the hair into the
tunnel, she clung to the iron fence that partially covered its opening. Then she
fought for her life: "People think a woman stops fighting when she is physically
exhausted, but I was about to begin my real fight, a fight of words and lies and
the brain... he held my life in his hands. Those who say they would rather fight
to the death than be raped are fools. I would rather be raped a thousand times.
You do what you have to."

In addition to providing us with
the account of her assault, Sebold illustrates in depth what the post-rape
process entails for the survivor. She walks back to her dormitory, past shocked
on-looking college students, drunk as they emerge from a party. Her R.A. calls
campus security. She is taken to the hospital, where a rape kit is completed.
Sebold describes what is taken from her body and how it is done. She is allowed
access to a bathroom and a shower only after the doctor has taken every sample
of evidence she can from Sebold's body. She is taken to the police station,
where the police compile a poor likeness of the attacker. The next day she
returns to the police station and gives an affidavit detailing the rape. When
she complains that the details of the affidavit taken by a police officer aren't
accurate, he tells her that it doesn't matter, that all they need is the gist of
what happened. She is also told that she can leave and go home as soon as she
signs it.

Sebold spends the summer at home
in Pennsylvania. She recuperates largely on her own; her family is perhaps as
emotionally constrained and distant as many others. Once Alice is home, she
wonders how her parents could have reacted to what had happened to her and to
one another. "What did they do? Did they hug? I can't imagine this, but they
might have. Did my mother whisper details about the police and my physical
condition, or did she promise she would tell him what she knew after I slept?"
Her father is an academic and spends the majority of the day behind closed doors
in his study reading Spanish literature. Her mother, a recovering alcoholic,
tries to avoid panic attacks. The pastor from her church visits and tries to
comfort Alice, as do some of the old women from the congregation. In a family so
influenced by her father's skeptical and intellectual personality and Sebold's
own frankness, however, the formality of these visits feel false. She, in
contrast, tries to force the reality of what happened to her in front of her
parents. When, upon her return home after the rape, her father asks her if she'd
like something to eat, Alice responds, "That would be nice, considering the only
thing I've had in my mouth in the last twenty-four hours is a cracker and a
cock." Her fondest memories from that summer reflect a similar appreciation for
bits of life typically not discussed around the Sebold dinner table. She
describes both of her parents giving chase through the house after she has led
the dogs to discover discarded tampons in the trash can in her mother's bedroom.

Alice returns to school in the
fall, much to the surprise of many of her classmates, some of whom know her
personally, others who know her simply as the girl who had been raped the
previous spring. Luck of a different sort played a significant role in Sebold's
life that fall. As a creative writing major, Sebold was fortunate enough to have
Tess Gallagher as her poetry professor and Tobias Wolff as her fiction
professor. Their personal support, particularly Gallagher's, became vital over
the coming months after Alice encounters her rapist on the sidewalk one day.
Sebold recognized him from a distance; he walked up to her and actually asked,
"Hey, girl, don't I know you from somewhere?" As she hurried away from the
chance encounter, she was lucky again: the rapist encountered a police officer
right after speaking with her. The officer's recollection of his encounter with
the man would help police identify and apprehend him; it would also bolster
Alice's case against the rapist after she identifies the wrong man during a line
up at the police station following the arrest.

As Alice hurries to campus to tell Wolff that she
can't attend class and to call a friend to get her back to her dorm, Sebold's
narrative moves to its next stage. Her account of the arrest, investigation, and
trial of her rapist is extremely detailed, both factually and emotionally, and
gives readers an extraordinary understanding and perspective on the burdens that
are placed on a rape survivor who chooses to pursue a criminal case. Fortunately
for her, first Gallagher, then Gallagher's partner, the late Raymond Carver,
support her and attend many meetings and pre-trial proceedings with her when her
parents do not come up to Syracuse from Pennsylvania. Wolff, after Alice tells
her that she must miss class because she has just seen her rapist, gives her
advice that becomes lucky for the reader and for Alice, too. The advice Wolff
gives her is heartfelt and hard-won and he knows of what he speaks; Wolff had
not yet published his own memoir, This Boy's Life,
about his childhood and the abuse he suffered at the hands of his stepfather.
Perhaps as writer and as human whose life had been scarred by violence, he
understood better than most people could have. "I remember his face and I
remember it vividly. He was a father. I knew this vaguely at the time. He had
little boys. He came near me. He wanted to comfort, but then, instinctually, he
pulled back. I was a rape victim; how would I interpret his touch? His face fell
into the recesses reserved for the pure confusion one expresses when there is
nothing on this earth that he or she can do to make something better." After
making sure that she was safe, had a ride home and access to a telephone, Wolff
"walked me back out into the hall. Before he let me go... Wolff stopped me and
put both hands on my shoulders. He looked at me and when it was clear to him
that for that second he held my attention, he spoke. 'Alice,' he said, 'a lot of
things are going to happen and this may not make much sense to you right now,
but listen. Try, if you can, to remember everything.'" Sebold wants to make sure
that we understand the power and the significance of Wolff's advice to her. "I
have to restrain myself from capitalizing the last two words. He meant them to
be capitalized. He meant them to resound and to meet me sometime in the future
on whatever path I chose. He had known me for two weeks. I was nineteen. I sat
in his class and drew flowers on my jeans. I had written a story about sewing
dummies that came to life and sought revenge on dressmakers. So it was a shout
across a great distance. He knew, as I was later to discover when I walked into
Doubleday on Fifth Avenue in New York and bought This Boy's Life,
Wolff's own story, that memory could save, that it had power, that it was often
the only recourse of the powerless, the oppressed, or the brutalized."

Sebold walks the reader through
every memory she kept. She walks us through the line up at the police station,
through her certainty immediately afterwards that she picked the wrong man out
of the line up, through her anger that the rapist and his lawyer were allowed to
include in the line up a friend of the rapist's who both knew bore a
near-identical resemblance to the rapist. She walks us through the preliminary
and grand jury hearings with near transcripts of her testimony. She remembers
the questions that the grand jurors posed to her: "Alice, why were you coming
through the park alone at night? Didn't anyone warn you not to go through the
park at night?" She remembers her testimony at the trial. She remembers the
conviction and sentence her rapist earned. She remembers, later in college, her
roommate being raped in their apartment and her decision not to pursue her case
and the end that decision brought to their friendship.

Remember Sebold did. In Lucky,
she keeps her promise to herself to one day write about what happened to her.
She keeps her promise to Wolff that she would remember everything. She
remembers, perhaps, for us, but most certainly for herself. For, as she tells
us, "you save yourself or you remain unsaved."